Simplification of commands AND sticky tags AND saved searches: ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!

1) Hashtag overhaul

As our long-term users know, the earlier versions of Twoodo involved learning the use of “#”, “>” and “*”. During our testing of Twoodo, we noticed that our multiple commands created a barrier to new users and increased the learning curve. User satisfaction is a crucial step to make people fall in love with us, so we wanted to deal with this issue as efficiently as possible.
We filmed users testing our platform and watched their interactions with the website. We noticed that unfamiliarity bred too much discomfort (perhaps even fear!) despite the autocomplete option to guide new users and the tips/suggestions.

So we scratched our heads and wondered what the problem was – until the moment of clarity (or, DUH!) hit us. Simplification. So:

“Why not use hashtags to designate all the actions and importance as well?”

It clicked for the whole team – and that’s a special event in itself! We are happy to announce that…

…you can now organize everything with hashtags, and not worry about all the extra commands!!!

A simple solution, and great progress for the product. So from now on, you will no longer need to remember what is the character for importance – just hashtag it as #critical, #high, #medium and #low. The same goes for #todo, #question and #vote.

We considered the problems that could arise from this changeover. Those hashtags need to be easy-access so you don’t have to go through the whole list of tags that you have. You need to focus on the important ones, so we are also adding a quick access button on the mobile and webapp!

2) Sticky tags

At Twoodo, we take peoples privacy very seriously. We don’t have access to their account or content, but we do have counters. And while we were going through them, we noticed something very interesting. About 73% of our users had 1 or 2 teams, and 82% of the posts had a team on the post. So that means that the majority of our users had to write down the team name on every single post – even though they were only using one team to begin with!

In addition to that we noticed that internally and in testing teams, that people were using “hacks” – instead of using tags and teams to compose a message, they would create a team with a category in one. Here is an example:

Instead of typing: “+team #category”, people were creating teams called “+team-category” to make it faster to add stuff.

And indeed, typing 1 tag instead of 2 is great increase in efficiency but we didn’t want our users to be forced to do that.

The Twoodo team is always looking for ways to increase efficiency, so we came up with this idea called “sticky tags”.

In the Command Box, you can now set sticky tags to it so you don’t have to type them every single time! Simply “Click” above the Command Box, select the +team or @person or #tag from the list… and it adds it. Thereafter, as soon as you post those tags will be automatically added to the post.

If you only use one team, the inputting process just got a lot smoother for you. And if we assume that you type on average 3 commands, you now only have to type 2, that’s an increase in efficiency of 33% !

3) Saved searches

During our observations, we also found that people tended to use the same search terms repeatedly. This also didn’t make sense to us – why have to waste time typing the same search over and over again? So, the final major change to Twoodo is the addition of saved searches – to make Twoodoing a WHOLE lot faster!

We <3 simpler stuff!

We’re really excited about these features, and we know users will love them – both new and old.

As always, we look forward to your feedback! Tweet us, email us, or send a messages via Facebook or Google+.